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What you can do for your country
Why dual citizens should be forced to choose
Andrew Coyne
National Post
Saturday, September 23, 2006
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Here's a statistic guaranteed to set your teeth on edge: Of the 15,000 Lebanese citizens evacuated from Beirut by Canadian Forces during last month's war -- the largest such operation this country has mounted since the Second World War, at a cost of $85-million -- some 7,000 are reported to have returned home. Home, as in Lebanon.
Why were Canadian ships sent thousands of miles across the sea to pluck another country's citizens out of harm's way? Because, as you well know, they are also Canadian citizens. That is, they are dual citizens, beneficiaries of a 1977 change in immigration legislation, and as such, though many have not lived or paid taxes in this country for several years, are entitled to all the protections the Canadian state affords.
Despite the public outrage this aroused at the time, the Harper government wisely decided the middle of a war was not the time to revisit the principle of dual citizenship: They were Canadian citizens, and that was that. But the war being now ended, the government is said to be considering whether to abolish this strangely ambivalent status, to which at least four million foreign-born Canadians, plus an uncounted number of native-born, lay claim.
If so, this would be an event of enormous symbolic importance. Moreover, it would fit this Prime Minister's broader aim, which is nothing less than to recast the meaning of Canadian nationhood -- as a moral project, in which we are collectively and individually engaged, rather than a simple dispenser of services; something that lays claims upon us, as much as it confers entitlements. And the very least claim it can make upon us is that we commit ourselves to it, to the exclusion of all others.
This asks no more of us than that we make a choice. It does not bind us permanently, nor does it impose any barrier to entry. We can be citizens of Lebanon first and then of Canada, or of Canada and then Lebanon. The only thing we can't do is be a citizen of both countries at the same time.
What's wrong with that? Nothing, if your view of nationhood is essentially service-based -- just as you can belong to two frequent-flier programs at the same time. But if you incline to a view of the nation as moral project, as a moral order we are in the process of constructing, then a higher degree of commitment is implied.
It seems to me that this latter view is pretty much intrinsic to the whole idea of nationhood. A nation is, after all, an abstraction. We know why we are members of a particular family or race or gender. But to say why we belong to a nation, especially this nation, requires us to give the matter some thought. And yet we know, intuitively, that it has something to do with moral purpose.
Provinces are essentially service-delivery agencies, inspiring the degree of loyalty that bloodless phrase deserves. But when we say we are Canadian, and swell with pride at the thought, it is because we invest it with some moral content. We associate the nation with our highest moral ambitions, as the vessel of our best selves.
But higher purpose is not achieved without reciprocal obligation. If a nation is something we do together, with and for each other, it requires us to make certain commitments to one another: to pay our taxes, to accept decisions that don't go our way, in extremis to lay down our lives for one another -- in short, to put each other first. The associations that inspire our fiercest loyalties -- our team, say, or our unit -- are not those that give things to us, but those that ask things of us. What, if anything, have we asked of ourselves?
If there was a moment when this thought began to crystallize in a lot of people's minds, it was a few years ago when Yann Martel, the winner of the 2002 Booker Prize for his novel The Life of Pi, referred to Canada as a "hotel." He meant it as a compliment, "the greatest hotel on Earth," but the image was jarring, almost transactional, implying the most fleeting sort of attachment.
And yet we have not drawn the appropriate conclusion. We still try to buy each other's affiliation, "selling" Canada to disaffected parts of the country on the basis of the benefits it can provide -- for what they can get out of it rather than what they can put into it. And we do not seem to notice that the more we have done so, the more disaffected they have become.
There is, however, an older tradition, memories of which lie buried deep in this country's collective consciousness, and it is one I believe the current Prime Minister is attempting to tap. You can see it in his invocation of our moral obligations in Afghanistan, in his unflinching challenge to Canadians to live up to our sometimes lofty notion of ourselves, even at the cost of Canadian lives.
Some look at our losses in Afghanistan and complain that we are bearing a "disproportionate" share of the burden. But there was a time when Canadians would have worn such distinctions with pride.
ac@andrewcoyne.com
